vrayReflection Render Element problem

[glorybound]

I don't want to hijack, but here is my RGB (left) and my Reflection (right). You can see the tree in my glass, but no color and dark. In the reflection element, it is basically black. In pre-Next the reflection would be mirror-like, with some transparency and the reflection element would be a mirror.

[matanov]

You're confused because of the naming and it's somehow understandable

There is only one thing that you should understand and memorize - "all direct reflections of lights now go to the Specular element and all indirect reflections go to the Reflection element"

You'll always need both elements to make changes to reflections as a whole.

[fixeighted]

That really is strange. We're all on the same version and I have perfectly good results....just as expected. I'm at a loss to explain how it could be different for you guys.
If you have the reflection in the beauty then you also have it in the combined specular and reflection/refraction.
I mean, naturally you can't 'boost' reflection that is not there initially....i.e. to my mind the main point of this exercise is that you output a higher reflectance than that which you need (on just the glass material) and 'lower' it in post to achieve the right blend.
Could you link a crop of a window from the VFB and also the associated elements maybe? Just a tiny exr to look at?

[fixeighted]

Ok, so you beat me to it with the crop
Problem solved

[kosso_olli]

Bobbys screenshots are great to show the concept: On the right image, you can see the tree in the reflection. This is an indirect reflection. What is missing the blue tint from the sky. This would be found in the specular pass, because as stated in the docs, this is considered a direct reflection. Yes, this concept is new for all of us, but after a while you are getting used to that. It will make things better in the future.

[OPEN_RANGE]

This has been informative. On suggestion from a respected and regular contributor to this forum, I had recently began incorporating the use of render elements in the post processing part of my workflow. This was also recently facilitated by the excellent exr-IO plug-in which makes this possible in photoshop.

The advice I followed was to put the specular and reflection elements above the effectsRGB layer and set those elements to ADD blending mode. Adjust their opacity to provide a little boost or pop to the reflections and specular highlights. This was easy to do and worked good, especially for the reflections.

I was doing this with vray Next. Now it doesn’t work with the reflection element, apparently due to changes made in vray Next update 1 (if I am understanding correctly).

I know that the development of vray is continuously advancing and being refined and I will always need to adapt to that. I’m used to that and accept it. Also I’m quite certain that the developers of vray know way more about how all of this is best accomplished than I ever have or will. Furthermore I know that many others make a much more elaborate use of render elements and this new refinement likely helps their process a lot.

So, I will try to learn how to achieve what I used to do in a different way....or evolve or not. I’m thinking of disabling the global switch that was suggested above by Oliver. I intuitively shy away from disabling default features but it seems worth trying in this case.